The latest outpost of "Keeping Score," Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony's multimedia music education empire, hits the radio waves this weekend with a swift but richly informative survey of some of the key turning points in the history of Western music.

Despite laboring under a title both clunky and breathless, "13 Days When Music Changed Forever" - which airs weekly on KQED (88.5), KDFC (90.3) and KALW (91.7) beginning Saturday - promises a series of sleek, meaty profiles of composers and individual masterpieces.

The first two episodes focus, respectively, on Monteverdi - particularly the beginning of opera with "Orfeo" - and Bach, and each offers a deft balance of history, aesthetics and musical clips. Best of all, both episodes feature a canny combination of close-up analysis and wide-angle context, so that individual pieces are never asked to carry more explanatory weight than they can manage.

Pop songsmith Suzanne Vega is once again a cool-toned host, and Thomas offers an engaging perspective on the rise of harmony and the nature of Baroque music.

The full series schedule, available online at www.keepingscore.org, will continue through the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Stravinsky before concluding with a look at Terry Riley's path breaking "In C" of 1964.

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